The mortgage blame game is the hottest ticket in town. With close to 2 million foreclosures expected this year, politicians are lining up to swoop in and save the day. Fingers are pointing in many directions – at predatory lenders, greedy mortgage brokers, lack of government oversight, etc.

Yet, today’s mortgage mess is but a symptom. The root illness is financial illiteracy.

Predatory lending is despicable. So too is the practice of providing murky disclosure when selling complex financial products. Yet as we point outward at ills to be rectified, let us not forget to look back in the mirror as well.

If more Americans had a solid understanding of how much house they truly could afford (which is not necessarily the amount a lender will loan), most people would have had the common sense not to bite off more house than they could chew. Without proper diagnosis and treatment of the root cause, we are in serious danger of seeing it repeat elsewhere in our economy.

As the storm brewing in the student loan world attests, financial ills can take many forms. The best defense is to take a class in Personal Finance 101.

Ask the following questions to Americans of all ages and you are likely to be greeted by blank stares:

How much should you be saving for your future?

How much can you comfortably afford to spend on a home?

What’s a reasonable price to pay for a car given your household income?

These are fundamental questions faced daily by millions of Americans. Unfortunately, not enough of us know the answers.

In the absence of a nationwide curriculum on the basics of personal finance, most people end up looking to “others” to figure out what’s financially reasonable. Alas, in today’s media-crazed society, we’ve blown way past keeping up with the Joneses. Today, we are increasingly inclined to envy the lives of the rich and famous. The result of this societal shift from a “horizontal” reference group to a “vertical” one has been a super-sizing of our consumptive appetites.

Combine this with relatively easy access to consumer credit, and the implications for our financial health are downright scary.

Historically, if a loan was going to seriously crimp your lifestyle, a lender was unlikely to make it. This was not out of altruism, but rather because the lender couldn’t charge enough in interest to make it worth the risk. According to Harvard Law professor and bankruptcy expert Elizabeth Warren, the combination of a 1978 Supreme Court ruling and the advent of sophisticated credit scoring models opened the door for risk-based pricing. The result was an explosion of readily available credit.

In the case of the current mortgage mess, the introduction and subsequent over-eager consumption of an alphabet soup of new-fangled mortgages (ARMs, Option ARMs, IOs, etc.) added explosive fuel to this fire. Gone were quaint notions of waiting to buy a home until you had a 20 percent down payment. The financial services industry encouraged us all to buy more, bigger and faster. Lacking a framework to assess these tantalizing offers, all too many of us across the economic spectrum went down the slippery slope and bought more house than we could afford.

The stories of earnest, hard-working Americans who will lose their homes as a result of “unknowingly” biting off more than they can chew are heart-breaking. The stories of hedge fund managers and their wealthy investors poised to lose billions on subprime bets gone bad are a little less so. Yet as the inevitable debate about reform begins, let’s not lose sight of an opportunity to do an even greater good.

Let’s use this mortgage meltdown and resultant credit crunch as a rallying point to start a nationwide financial literacy movement, and help all Americans learn how to live from a position of financial strength. We must learn how to balance our desire to enjoy today with the need to save and invest for tomorrow.